HP ProLiant DL585 G7 review

AMD is on to a winner with its Opteron 6100 processors. It wasn’t long ago we were bemoaning the dearth of AMD review servers, but now we’re being inundated by them. Dell was first through the labs with its quad-socket PowerEdge R815; we have Gateway’s GR585 F1 this month; and now HP has given us exclusive access to a full production ProLiant DL585 G7.

The DL585 G7 is different to the 2U systems from Dell and Gateway. For starters, it’s twice the height. The main reason for this is the full-width drawer at the front that contains primary and secondary daughterboards holding the processors and memory.

The drawer can be removed by pressing the clip at the top, which releases a large handle. Locking the tabs on the sides of the drawer stop it accidentally falling out, and with these depressed it can be slid out completely.

The daughterboards are stacked vertically, with each presenting two processor sockets and a total of 24 DIMM sockets. The top board has two release handles and can be easily removed to access the one underneath.

HP dedicates 12 DIMM sockets to each processor, although AMD’s chipset supports a maximum of 512GB. Using costly 16GB DDR3 RDIMMs will take up only 32 of the available sockets, or you can go up to 384GB with a full house of 8GB modules.

Although the drawer takes up most of the front panel, HP has squeezed in eight SFF hot-swap disk bays. We were supplied with two 300GB 6Gbits/sec SAS drives, but HP also offers near-line SAS models so you can focus on capacity and price rather than performance.

The primary processor board in the base mates with a power distribution connector and a horizontal system board that takes up half the width of the chassis. There’s a dedicated slot for a vertical SPI board packed with embedded features: it has a Smart Array P410i RAID controller and cache memory slot, with the pair of SAS ports cabled directly to the drive backplane.

The review system included 1GB of HP’s flash-backed write cache and the battery backup pack. The P410i supports mirrors, stripes and RAID5 as standard, and adding an advanced licence pack brings RAID6 into the storage equation.

The SPI board presents a quartet of Gigabit ports at the rear and an expansion slot for HP’s dual-port 10-Gigabit SFP module. It also features HP’s new iLO3 remote management controller, providing a dedicated Fast Ethernet port for management access and pairs of USB and PS/2 ports too.

Virtualisation is well catered for, with the system board offering two internal USB ports and an embedded SD memory card slot on the SPI board. You can add a SATA DVD drive at the front; the system board has the interface cable ready and waiting for it.

The DL585 G7 excels when it comes to expansion: there are five available PCI Express slots, all supporting full-height, full-length cards. There’s room to add an extra I/O expansion board and HP offers options with six more PCI Express slots or a mixture of these and PCI Extended.

For power redundancy, the DL585 G7 includes four 1,200W hot-plug modules: it did well in our power tests, with its four 2.1GHz 6172 Opterons pulling 356W in idle and peaking at 710W with SiSoft Sandra. This compares favourably with Dell’s R815, which drew 335W in idle and 618W under load. This had four 2.2GHz AMD 6174 Opterons, 64GB of memory and only two 1,023W power supplies.

Gateway’s GR585 F1 drew 159W in idle and 328W under load, but it’s difficult to compare as our review system had only one 1,400W supply plus two processors. Doubling the numbers does show the DL585’s monster hardware package isn’t overly greedy, though.

The choices for 4P servers using AMD’s Opteron 6100 processors seem clear cut. If price is top priority then Gateway’s GR585 F1 offers the best value package. In Dell’s PowerEdge R815 you have high rack-cabinet processing density, good support for virtualisation and decent remote management features. Although the DL585 G7 is the most expensive, it suits businesses looking for a server consolidation and virtualisation platform with massive expansion potential, the best remote management tools and good storage options.